Rob Bondgren: Made Flesh

"Rob Bondgren exposes the body for what it is- both a commodified and consumed stereotype and, at the same time, the vessel we daily inhabit. His work takes the image of the body — or, rather, only its parts — as the boundary through which we first encounter each other. Like it or not, our interactions and relations are filtered through how we see, how we yearn for, how we recognize, and how we interpret bodies and their parts. Bondgren’s work embraces the forces of desire and fantasy that battle on the image of the male body to reveal it as something we both love and hate, that’s both personal and alien. Both in his paintings of erotic narratives and in collages that seem, at first, more abstract than representational, he takes apart the body in order to expose, to cherish, and to criticize the images given to us by advertising, by pornography, and by each other. The bodies we see in mainstream media are not our own, and we are relentlessly bombarded by images that make us question and compare ourselves to the unrealizable. It is easy to critique advertising, pornography, and the photoshopped ideal. Bondgren’s work embarks on the more perilous path of activating the desire that pulses in response to the idealized image of the body and its parts while at the same time exposing its artificiality and its inhumanity. Moving between representation and abstraction, and blurring the lines between graphic design and painting, he props these images of parts against equally (or more) sensuous abstract lines, painted contours, and unrecognizable fragments. In his work, these non-figurative elements compete for our attention and attempt to seduce us into seeing them as parts to be loved and desired — even if we don’t know why. It is this promiscuous relation between appropriated images and created forms that makes Bondgren’s work subversive in a sensuality in which glimpses of fantasy and flashes of accusation compete for our look."

David Getsy, June 2008